"Take three pounds of ripe pumpkin, peel and remove the seeds, cut into pieces of moderate size, and place in a stewpan over the fire with a pint of water; let it boil slowly till soft, strain off all the water, and pass the pumpkin through a colander; return the pulp into the stew pan adding nearly three pints of milk, one ounce or more of butter, a pinch of salt and pepper, and a few lumps of loaf sugar; boil for ten minutes, stiring often. Pour it boiling into the dish, on very thin slices of bread. The sugar improves the flavor but may be omitted. It can be seasoned with a blade of mace or a little nutmeg."

Follow Jennie June's directions for cooking the pumpkin, and after draining reduce it to a pulp by one of the following methods:-Passing through a colander, as June suggests.-Mashing with a potato masher (my preferred method).-Passing through a rotary food mill.This should yield about 2 1/4 cups mashed pumpkin.

Return the pumpkin pulp to medium heat, add the butter, and stir until the butter disappears into the pumpkin. (This only takes a few seconds, and keeps the butter from floating up to the top of the milk as separate fat globules.) Then add the milk and salt, mix thoroughly, and continue heating until the soup boils. Pour over the bread and top with freshly ground pepper and nutmeg or mace.

Notes: The mere two cups of milk I use make this more of a chowder than a soup, especially when the bread dissolves in the liquid. June's recommendation of "nearly three pints" (6 cups) of milk makes a much thinner soup: Individual tastes vary and people should adjust the amount to their own preferences.

This soup is excellent with steamed cauliflower, either as a side or added to the soup.

​A few days ago I was reading an article in the January, 1896 edition of Good Housekeeping about the recent census. The sentiments it expressed about the amazing diversity of people's lives were very familiar to me —in fact, they bore a striking resemblance to a passage from my own book which I had just read at a bookstore event the night before.

Here's the passage from my own book:

"People say the devil is in the details, but I contend that a great many angels reside there as well. For one thing, details distinguish cultures from one another and allow us to revel in the great diversity that the human race can manifest. All people have the same basic needs of shelter, food, and companionship, yet the ways we define and realize these things vary widely. One’s specific outlines of their needs define not only their culture, but increasingly specific subsets thereof, narrowing down to the identity that is truly their own. Shelter can be any structure from a palace to a yurt; food may range from raw seaweed to roast ortolan. As for companionship, it might take an entire network of acquaint- ances to stave off loneliness from one person, while another is happy nested within a large family or cuddled close to the heart of one person who means the world to them. For some, all it takes is a pet or a single cherished book. These differences are details, it’s true, but they are details that define us and that we, in turn, define through our own choices and resources." --This Victorian Life, Skyhorse Publishing, 2015. p. xvi.

Here's the piece from the 1896 article:

...This name of one of our dearest possessions, "home," is a general one that applies to infinite varieties. Among the many millions of homes in the world no two are exactly alike... Every person must have a home of some sort, and it need not necessarily be a home as we commonly have it in mind—a home which some member of the family owns or hires, consisting of a dwelling house standing on, or in, a lot of land, with more or less of home furnishings, perhaps with outbuildings and shade trees. This, briefly, is our ordinary idea of a home; but the Superintendent of the Census said that a man's home is where he eats and sleeps, or, if he eats and sleeps in different places, then were he sleeps, and if he sleeps here one night and there another, then the place where he slept on the day when the agent of the government found him was to be regarded as his "home." And so every person must have a home. It may be a gypsy camp, moving from day to day, or a camp of perambulating cowboys, whose only covering under the stars of night is their blankets, whose kitchen is a covered wagon and a small hole in the ground, where the fire is protected from the wind, and the remainder of whose home is bounded by the horizon for the time being. So is a lumberman's camp a home, or a camp of miners, or of railroad builders. The hermit's log hut in the wilderness is his home. The crowded tenament house in the city, the monotonous rows of "brown-stone fronts," and of factory dwellings, a tenement house that has risen to the dignity of a flat, a loft over a stable, the attic of a warehouse, steamboats and ships, hotels and boarding houses—all these are or may be homes, and so are the fisherman's hut by the seashore, the slab shanty of the charcoal burner, and the canal boat. The home of a tramp was a barn last night, it will be under a pine tree to-night. A man in Washington, D.C., had his home in a tree for several years. Indeed, the home may be almost anywhere and everywhere—in the crowded, noisy, dirty city; in the beautiful village, with its green lawns and shade trees and dwellings that suggest comfort, at least, and happiness; or it may be out in the country in a pretty valley, or out in the broad prairie of farms..." --Good Housekeeping, January, 1896, pp. 1-5.

Whenever we are living, or however we format that life, the human race exhibits an amazing diversity of people. Our cultures and our homes are as individual as we are ourselves, and it is that very individuality which makes the world fascinating and beautiful.

"But all the other edifices destroyed by the fury of the Terrorists have been restored... Those who, in the days of disaster and tribulation, prophesied that the fair city on the banks of the Seine—to-day the gay and beautiful capital of a consolidated Republic—would never regain her past splendour and prestige, forgot that beneath the bark, with full-spread sail, forming the city's escutcheon, there figures the appropriate motto—"FLUCTUAT NEC MERGITUR."" —Henry Vizetelly, "Paris in Peril", 1882.

Let us gather the sweetest of flowers--The violet, fragrant and blue,The fairest and stateliest lilies,And roses of loveliest hue;Let us twine them in wreaths and in garlands,In cross and in anchor and crown;And on the low graves of our comradesWe lay them in reverence down.

There Time, with the tenderest fingersHas bidden the soft grasses wave,And the wild flowers blossom in beautyAbove every slumberer's grave.--The robin sings there his gay carols--All voices of Nature are heard,And daily their music uprisethFrom breeze and from bee and from bird.

She cares not if moss or if marbleOr naught mark the place of their rest--On each fall the tears of the raindrops,She keepeth each safe in her breast.--Her daisies unfold their white petalsAlike o'er the high and the low;In verdure she hides them in summer,In winter she gives them her snow.

We come with our garlands in SpringtimeTo deck the low mounds where they lie,Yet Nature, our mother, is kinderFor never she passes them by!We come with our bands and our musicBut once, and perchance with a tear,But the songs and the sighing of NatureNever cease through the circling year!

Our garlands will fade and will whither,Her's blossom anew with the Spring;Our songs must die out into silence,Her anthems more joyously ring!With those whose low mounds we're adorningIn a dreamless sleep must we share,And the tender arms of our motherEnfold us with like loving care.--

Sound, music! with saddest of dirges!Ring, bugles! with softest of notes!And comrades, while gently their sighingIn sweetest of harmony floats--Come forth, with cross, and with crown,And on the low graves of our brothers,Oh, lay them in reverence down!

Today is the official release date for my new book!

Part memoir, part micro-history, this is an exploration of the present through the lens of the past.

We all know that the best way to study a foreign language is to go to a country where it's spoken, but can the same immersion method be applied to history? How do interactions with antique objects influence perceptions of the modern world?

From Victorian beauty regimes to nineteenth-century bicycles, custard recipes to taxidermy experiments, oil lamps to an ice box, Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman decided to explore nineteenth-century culture and technologies from the inside out. Even the deepest aspects of their lives became affected, and the more immersed they became in the late Victorian era, the more aware they grew of its legacies permeating the twenty-first century.​Most of us have dreamed of time travel, but what if that dream could come true? Certain universal constants remain steady for all people regardless of time or place. No matter where, when, or who we are, humans share similar passions and fears, joys and triumphs.In her first book, Victorian Secrets, Chrisman recalled the first year she spent wearing a Victorian corset 24/7. In This Victorian Life, Chrisman picks up where Secrets left off and documents her complete shift into living as though she were in the nineteenth century.

“A journey to the past through the eyes of the future, both educating and enthralling with Chrisman’s oftentimes humorous adventures with the Victorian Era.” —Grace Gold, beauty and wellness expert and journalist

“The Chrismans give our shared history a shocking tangibility and help us see that the past is much more present, everyday, than we might realize.” —Britt Sondreal, host of BreakThru Radio’s Sew & Tell

"Sarah Chrisman’s foray into a lifeway of Victorian foods, furnishings, and technologies deftly avoids romanticizing this 1880s-90s era while presenting its pleasures and challenges. The Victorian was in many ways a companion era to the late twentieth century. It was not a time of “simplicity.” It was a time of emergence of many economic institutions and technologies we think of as distinctly modern: department stores, electric cars, telecommunications, competitive displays at home of wealth and leisure--the birthing of the consumerism that in 1899 Thorstein Veblen first called conspicuous consumption. Yet Victorians also celebrated beauty, crafts, artisanal attention to quality foods, and clever entrepreneurial endeavors that led to diversity in every new available thing. Exploring the properties of clothing, watches, bicycles, ink-- just as the households of that time, she revels in every detail. These are fascinating reflections on how each Victorian object shapes understandings of everyday life."

--Jeanne E Arnold, lead author, Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century.